Illustrator, Graphic Designer, UI Designer

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Interaction Design

With all of my studying and research, I wanted to share some important rules I’ve come across several times when designing with interaction in mind.

Goal-driven Design: You want to design for the right user. User research, such as surveys and interviews, will help you create personas for those most likely to use your app. This allows you to create specific goals for your users and tailor your app’s workflow to suit their needs.

Usability: Your app has to be usable. If your audience can’t easily use the app, then they certainly won’t download it from the App Store. Usability makes a product useful, which is the first step in being desirable.

Affordance & Signifiers: The affordance is the function. Signifiers hint at affordance. For example, blue, underlined text indicates that clicking on it will take you elsewhere. Use signifiers correctly so users don’t need to think about what each UI element does.

Learnability: You want users to instinctively know how to use an interface. This is where design patterns come in handy. Familiar patterns help a new user easily acclimate to an app.

Feedback & Response Time: Feedback lets users know if a task was completed or not. It can be as simple as a beep, or more complex like a modal window. Make sure your feedback is friendly, human.

These 5 rules are the foundation of interaction design. Again, the user and the way they interact with your design is the most important thing to keep in mind. If a design is pretty but not functional, it is a failure in the end.